Human CO2 Saves Planet

This is a cute item that brings a couple of things back in focus. First off the apparent geological history of CO2 content is hardly constant and shows serious variation. Or so we think. We are depending on proxies and worse, interpretation built on those proxies. For that reason, I am very wary of the numbers bandied about as truth.

I also suspect that over the millennia, that the CO2 is held within a safe channel by the oceans’ CO2 sink. When it is far too low, it begins to give up CO2. I do not know this as a fact, but it fits the natural model of these things and it is also likely a rather slow process that reflects the centuries. The reverse process should kick in when the CO2 level abruptly climbs as has happened over the past two centuries. So what do we make of former levels approaching 200 ppm and even earlier levels approaching a supposed optimum of 1000 ppm.

Recall something else, often over looked. The Holocene is only 10,000 years old. It is clearly warmer and climatically stable. That should have caused a great deal of CO2 to be freshly sequestered in new plant growth. Also as the ice retreated, the mosses advanced and created huge frozen peat bogs again trapping huge amounts of carbon. Thus it is no surprise that CO2 was in decline and possibly from a high level.

Pre Ice Age, we believe CO2 was much higher. During the Ice Age it dropped severely provided the numbers here are correct and that the Ice Age was a lot longer than we think. This is not unreasonable.

Then post Ice Age a great deal of available carbon was again converted to plant material.

Yes, we might actually be busy restoring the necessary carbon content.

It all comes back to just how much we wish to trust our proxies.

Humans and Their CO2 Save the Planet!

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/humans-and-their-co2-save-the-planet/?print=1

Posted By Frank J. Tipler On August 5, 2009 @ 6:59 am In . Positioning, Legal, Science, Science & Technology, US News

As the Senate considers the fate of the cap-and-trade bill, we should consider what it means for more carbon dioxide to be added to the atmosphere, something the bill intends to prevent.

Carbon dioxide is first and foremost a plant food. In fact, plants take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use the energy from sunlight to combine the CO2 with water to yield glucose, the simplest sugar molecule. Carbon dioxide is also the source of all organic — this word just means “contains carbon” — molecules synthesized by plants. Without carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, there would be no organic molecules synthesized by plants. The less carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere, the fewer organic molecules synthesized by plants. All animals depend on plants to synthesize essential organic molecules. Without the organic molecules synthesized by plants, the animal world could not exist. Without plants, there would be no biosphere.

Several million years ago, a disaster struck the terrestrial biosphere: there was a drastic reduction in the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere.

The flowering plants evolved to be most efficient when the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere was about 1,000 parts per million. But the percentage had dropped to a mere 200 parts per million. Plants tried to adapt by evolving a new, more efficient way of using the little remaining CO2. The new mechanism, the C4 pathway, appeared in grasses, including corn and wheat, which enabled these plants to expand into the plains. If the carbon dioxide percentage had stayed low — or worse, had decreased further — the entire biosphere would have been endangered.

Fortunately for the plants and the rest of the biosphere depending on them, a wonderful thing happened about 150,000 years ago: a new animal species, Homo sapiens, evolved. This creature was endowed with a huge brain, enabling it to invent a way to help the plants with their CO2 problem. Gigantic amounts of carbon had been deposited deep underground in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas. Not only were these reservoirs of carbon locked away in rock, but they were in forms of carbon that the plants could not use.

These wonderful humans, however, worked hard to help the plants. Not only did the humans dig the coal, oil, and natural gas, bringing it to the surface, but they converted these raw materials into the only form of carbon that plants could use: carbon dioxide. Due to the diligent plant-saving efforts of the humans, the CO2 atmospheric percentage is now at nearly 390 parts per million. Were humans to continue in their biosphere-rescuing efforts at the present rate, the CO2 level will be returned to normal in a mere few hundred years.

The cap-and-trade bill is designed to stop this effort to save the biosphere. This is a profoundly evil act. In the words of the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, anyone who supports the bill, or any measure aimed at reducing the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, is “guilty of treason against the planet”!

Those who want to reduce the use of fossil fuels are the mortal enemies of the biosphere. They must be stopped at all costs! Write your senator at once!

The astute reader will have noted that Krugman actually accused those who opposed the cap-and-trade bill of “treason against the planet.” What I have done is use well-known science to show that, from the biosphere’s point of view, it is the cap-and-trade bill that is “treasonable.” Remarkably, Krugman assumes that the climatic conditions of a mere century or so ago are the “natural” ones that must not be changed. A very anthropomorphic point of view is being used to denounce humanity. An ultraconservative reactionary political position is being called “progressive.”

19000 Year History - Great floods

I am in receipt of a 600 page manuscript written by Prithvi titled: ‘19,000 Years of World History - The Story of Religion by Prithviraj R ‘. It solves a problem for me.

Those who have been following my postings know that we have reconstructed a large swath of the Earth’s physical history covering the past through the late Ice Age and into the Holocene. In particular we have the Pleistocene Nonconformity, the collapse of the Ice Age itself, the rise of the Bronze age, its European collapse, Atlantis, global emergence of agricultural man and so on.

I have had some cultural sources, principally the Bible as an informant for certain times and places and as a strong source of suggestions for informed inquiry. Homer gives us the very late Bronze Age in the Baltic as per da Vinci. I always knew that a large stock of cultural data was also stored in the scriptural material surviving in the Indian subcontinent. This material has been effectively unavailable or at best inaccessible. Either we had raw translations by those blinded by a classical western viewpoint or interpretive reconstructions again misleading.

Whereas I am looking for the background and what is naturally written between the lines. The task was as daunting as the one that I was engaged on myself over my own lifetime and a cursory attack was impossible, just as a cursory reading of the bible will never help much.

Anyway, it seems that Prithvi was up to the task and has produced a fully modern interpretation of these scriptures that is informed by the mass of recent discoveries and due confidence in the observers themselves.

The first thing that arose when I cracked open the text is that we have hard cultural information on the Great Floods brought about by the reduction of the Northern Ice Sheet. This means that reconstruction has a viable starting point.

Recall that the shift of the crust almost 12,000 years ago moved the cap thirty degrees south along the Hudson Bay meridian. The ice then began to melt. In the process it produced Lake Missoula and that ultimately extended into the Bay. This water was impounded by the mass of the northern parts of the sheet and eventually highlands surrounding the Bay. Escapement naturally happened in catastrophic phases, many of which were small such as that which created the scablands in Washington and Oregon. However, major escapements were probable and would have caused sudden rises in the ocean level.

Prithvi reports:

‘14,000, 11,500, 8000, and 5000 years ago. And I believe that human civilization has been badly mauled during each of these floods. And worldwide flood myths, in all likelihood, are referring to four distinct floods! Each flood destroyed civilizations; and most importantly, the technology that existed at the time got destroyed, causing human advancement to go backward rather than forward.’

‘And chances are that such universal floods have occurred several times in recent history, four times to be precise. The most compelling evidence regarding the floods has been found off the coast of Barbados, in terms of three ancient coral reefs. These coral reefs survive only at a specific depth. And they seem to have been drowned suddenly, three times, during the last ice age at about 14,000, 11,000, and 8,000 years ago7. The fact that these coral reefs were not drowned 5,000 years ago seems to indicate that our 3000 BC flood was not that universal.’

So we observe the existence of four separate great floods, the last been the least. This also tells us something else that I suspected and now see essentially confirmed. I already know that the 11,900 BP event was no accident. However the sudden decline beginning about 18,000 years ago is also likely caused by an earlier crustal shift that was possibly naturally induced and provided the precedent needed to attempt the one that ushered in the Holocene. Otherwise, I simply do not see it ever been attempted.

The Floods of 11,500 BP is well attested to and been derived from the crustal shift would have been in the form of massive surges. We thus have two principal Holocene floods at 8000 BP and 5000 BP. I do not know how good those dates are, since the prior attempts at geological dating made them older. In fact I am going to have to revisit the dating problem again in an attempt to pin as much down as possible. The only thing that we can have confidence in is that the events took place and that cultural reports that should exist are now in hand.

What I will try to do is to stick to his dating in this and related articles.

The last two were both escapement floods, the last one finally clearing Hudson Bay. It did not wreck everything and largely went unremarked. The main escapement event would be the first such event in 8000 BP and this likely added over a hundred feet to the sea level. It also likely over topped the land barrier into the Black Sea to produce that flood. Wikipedia puts a time frame of 9500 years ago on this event and the 1500 year gap is similar to the gap I recall for the 5000 BP event which shows elsewhere at 6500 BP. I personally think that later is much better because there was a lot of ice to melt.

As I work my way through the manuscript, I will write columns on relevant material and post them here under the lead of 19,000 years of history.

Global Temperature Decline

This item gives us a fair measure of the total temperature decline over the past several years. This means that the bulk of the gain that had all excited has now dissipated. It is still set about the normal average so it is not getting colder per se. And average for the twentieth century is sufficient to maintain pressure on the sea ice.

The Holocene has a remarkably stable two degree spread. We saw the bottom during the little ice age and recently we had a look at the top. CO2 remains unconvincing for all this. Quite simply, CO2 is on a persistent uptrend that will be broken during this century as we convert to alternative power and abandon coal and hydrocarbons. Global temperatures are not on a persistent general trend but are showing decadal fluctuations in a warm century not impacted by cooling major events.

This general reversal has made fools of the Al Gore School of climate science as it really had too. This is specifically why I began this blog by disassociating the current temperature uptrend form the long established rise in CO2. I thought at the time that the claimed linkage was optimistic and also highly suspect science. So far, I have had no reason whatsoever to change that opinion. We still have increasing CO2 to counter and this blog has been in the forefront in establishing viable options. Otherwise we get to talk about the weather when things slow down a bit.

Earth's 'Fever' Breaks! Global temperatures 'have plunged .74°F since Gore released An Inconvenient Truth'

June 2009 saw another drop in global temps

Sunday, July 05, 2009By Marc Morano – Climate Depot
The latest global averaged satellite temperature data for June 2009 reveals yet another drop in the Earth's temperature. This latest drop in global temperatures means despite his dire warnings, the Earth has cooled .74°F since former Vice President Al Gore released "An Inconvenient Truth" in 2006.

According to the latest data courtesy of algorelied.com: "For the record, this month's Al Gore / 'An Inconvenient Truth' Index indicates that global temperatures have plunged approximately .74°F (.39°C) since Gore's film was released." (see satellite temperature chart here with key dates noted, courtesy of www.Algorelied.com - The global satellite temperature data comes from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Also see: 8 Year Downtrend Continues in Global Temps)

Gore -- who is fond of saying the Earth has a "fever" -- has not yet addressed the simple fact that global temperatures have dropped since the release of his global warming film. (Gore has also not addressed this: Another Moonwalker Defies Gore: NASA Astronaut Dr. Buzz Aldrin rejects global warming fears: 'Climate has been changing for billions of years' - Moonwalkers Defy Gore's Claim That Climate Skeptics Are Akin To Those Who Believe Moon Landing was 'Staged')

A record cool summer has descended upon many parts of the U.S. after predictions of the "year without a summer." There has been no significant global warming since 1995, no warming since 1998 and global cooling for the past few years.

In addition, New peer-reviewed scientific studies now predict a continued lack of global warming for up to three decades as natural climate factors dominate. (See: Climate Fears RIP...for 30 years!? - Global Warming could stop 'for up to 30 years! Warming 'On Hold?...'Could go into hiding for decades' study finds – Discovery.com – March 2, 2009 )

This means that today's high school kids being forced to watch Al Gore's “An Inconvenient Truth” – some of them 4 times in 4 different classes – will be nearly eligible for AARP (age 50) retirement group membership by the time warming resumes if these new studies turn out to be correct. (Editor's Note: Claims that warming will “resume” due to explosive heat in the "pipeline" have also been thoroughly debunked. See: Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. 'There is no warming in the pipeline' )

Global Warming Heat

This is a good as time as any to comment on the global warming debate. Recent days have seen some fairly hysterical mutual abuse between the two camps who have even gone so far as to associate themselves with the politics of the left and right.

I want you to think about what I just said. How can an issue of science have anything whatsoever to do with your political ideas? That a conservative senator chose to hire a staffer to locate sources that challenged the deluge of pro warming material that is at least as sloppy as any on the other side of the debate is still a necessary public service.

At least I know that the more egregious nonsense will be challenged as they should be.

The debate is now descending to the juvenile art of labeling.

What I must remind everyone is that we are living in a climatic era rightly named the Holocene. Our era has demonstrated a temperature range of variability of about two degrees. Over and over again we have warmed up to present conditions and sometimes a bit higher, before tumbling back as much as two degrees. This channel has been good for ten thousand years and there is no suggestion that it ever varied out of that range, including the little ice age.

I was hopeful that the present warm spell could be maintained as happened during the medieval warm period. It chose not to on the basis of the past twelve months. We have lost a degree as you may have well noticed.

All things been equal we have returned fully to lousy weather for decades. An equally fast advance in warming is an unprecedented climate event in terms of our knowledge, while a fast chilling such as we just experienced is not. In other words a quick recovery is out of the question while an additional drop is not.

Neither side has bothered to put the debate in the perspective of the Holocene which leaves nothing to debate at all.

I have argued ample reasons for the existence of the Holocene, but that is unimportant inasmuch as it clearly exists and is the subject of several earlier posts.

It appears that the Holocene exhibits natural governors that are able to keep the climate well channeled. We have just watched a forty year accumulation of heat be handily discharged into Arctic with minimal effect. I imagine if it got far too cold that the gulf stream would sharply strengthen or the Pacific would do something.

A year ago I was prepared to give the global warming hypothesis a chance. All the Earth had to do was maintain the temperature regime. It did not.

Ocean of Heat

As you probably suspect, I glean reams of news stories related to the Global Warming theory. It goes without saying that much of it is errant nonsense. It is again time to spell out the facts that are facts.


1 The Northern Hemisphere has warmed. We know that because the Arctic has a longer spring and summer. A direct result has been the opening of the two northern sea routes for the first time. Also glaciers are retreating all over the northern hemisphere. That pretty well confirms that this is a warm spell. Even the number fools who note that 2008 is the coolest year in the past five point out that still means that it is above average and has been above average for five years. We need seriously below average now to reset the averages back to normal. So yes it is actually much warmer in the Arctic.

2 The Southern Hemisphere has cooled. Glaciers are growing. The amount of cooling involved is either a mirror image of the northern warming or a very large fraction thereof. It is colder and thankfully, we do not try to have billions live there.

3 External drivers such as excess CO2 and solar variation have been presumed to alter global temperatures. The scientific support for either proposition is tenuous. For CO2 it was for ten years clearly coincidental. Since then for ten years it has been contrary. The solar variation idea is also potentially coincidental but more compellingly so for the two specific cases that exist.

4 It is not obvious that Northern Europe is a viable proxy for the Globe. Again we have the present situation in which a clear northern warming trend is been countered by a southern cooling trend. This is an actual expectation for an invariable heat supply model that must surely trend in one direction or the other however slightly.

In the event, we have a serious lack of proxies around the globe over a useful time range to provide confident projections. The historical weather data keeping that is most of two hundred years old has been vulnerable to the heat island effect adding yet another source of error that must be continuously adjusted with unaffected comparables. It has been claimed that this is well handled but even that has come into question.

We have data over a fairly short time period of two centuries in some parts of the globe. We have a lot more data covering the past century steadily improving to the beginning of satellite monitoring almost thirty years ago. Present methods can be the gold standard and actually accepted as having a very low measurable error. Yet that is only thirty years old and all preceding proxies, however obtained will always be suspect at least. Look at the debate over whether the warming of the 1930’s is comparable to the warming ending in 1998.

Right now we lack an explanation for the clear decadal heat shift from the south to the north. Or perhaps we mistake the cooling of the south as anomalous. It could well be simply a continuation of normal behavior that is perhaps slightly slowed because it is warmer generally. The cooling engine of the south is huge compared to the cooling effects of the northern winter. The idea that it is still cooling while a little more heat is keeping the north warmer could be made. Again we lack the centuries of data needed to address these facts coherently.

My principle hypothesis is that left to its own devices, the northern hemisphere will slowly warm to Bronze Age conditions in which the winter sea ice is fully removed every year. This implies improved growing conditions in the higher latitudes. The Baltic becomes pleasant again and the permafrost will disappear in Greenland and over vast swathes of the boreal forest. The tree line will perhaps advance a little.

The evidence shows that this natural warming trend of the atmosphere has been interrupted by volcanic activity again and again. It certainly appears to be the most likely causation of abrupt declines in temperatures over the span of the Holocene. Other sources of cooling will not be so obviously abrupt but still must be considered. The reason for this is that it appears that the earth conserves a lot more heat than we have ever given it credit for. The atmosphere is not the sole store of heat. Without doing a calculation, oceanic heat storage is easily as potent and the ambient temperature of land is also available very slowly.

We live in an ocean of heat and it is very difficult to determine trends and variances with any confidence let alone assign actual cause and effect.

Greenland Ice Cores

This is an important review of the Greenland ice core data. For some reason, and not the reason that I espouse today, in the early nineties, I saw fit to locate the raw ice core data and download it on my old 386. This was before browsers so that meant locating the appropriate bulletin board and getting the text file. Now you have to pay for it.

I was able to satisfy myself of the existence of a climate break about 12,900 years ago. I also realized that this was rapidly approaching the limits of data retention by the cores. Resolution was breaking down and becoming increasingly unreliable. That is worth remembering, though I anticipate that the number of cores has increased markedly and that is somewhat improving resolution.

We now have three apparently well defined climate breaks. The first at 14,700 years was a sharp global warming of around ten degrees or so that arrived over night and then fairly quickly reversed and disappeared restoring former conditions. This has been associated with a huge fresh water pulse out of the Antarctic, although I do not know how they know that. It does make sense that this was driven by events out of the Antarctic.

The second event 12,900 years ago we have already described as the Pleistocene Nonconformity, in which the crust shifted thirty degrees, placing the icecap out of the polar region. This obviously implied a climate shift that would be reflected as a precipitation change immediately upon the events occurrence. The ice core record shows just that and in fact we can split the record into before and after uniform precipitation averages. This shrouds the importance of the other two events and makes them easy to ignore as I did when I first reviewed the data.

The third event 11,700 years ago must coincide with the flushing of the monster lake Agassiz. This huge sea of melt water broke out and drained probably within a year, causing a worldwide coastal flooding event that may well be one of the sources of the cultural history of global floods.

It continues to amaze me how successful oral histories were able to transmit the gist of real events over thousands of years. You would expect natural skepticism and story telling insertions to wreck most or these transmittals. Yet this is not so at all. These ancient tales are constantly the inspiration of new explorations and scholarly investigations that keep bearing fruit. Even the tales of Eldorado has dug up a huge Indian civilization in the Amazon were our scholarship said such was impossible. My single regret is that we have inadvertently lost so much over the years that may have been instructive from this lode.

What I want to emphasize to my readers is that major climatic shifts all have reasonable apparent nonclimatic causation. In each case a significant shift of material took place. The Antarctic case sounds like a major ice sheet collapse that shifted the climatic circulation around. The second and third speak for themselves.

What is totally marvelous is that this has created a stunningly stable climatic system for the Northern Hemisphere which is not going to revisit the ice age for a likely million years or so. In fact, the only engine besides a super volcano that is capable of truly disturbing the climate is another ice sheet collapse and the evidence now suggests that could actually warm the climate rather than cool it. Both such events are ultimately temporary, but the victims will not be able to complain.

June 23, 2008

Ice Core Reveals How Quickly Climate Can Change

Weather patterns can permanently shift in as little as a year, according to the records preserved in an ice core from Greenland

By David Biello

Roughly 14,700 years ago the weather patterns that bring snow to Greenland shifted from one year to the next—a pattern of abrupt change that was repeated 12,900 years ago and 11,700 years ago when the earth’s climate became the one enjoyed today—according to records preserved in an ice core taken from the northern island. These speedy changes—transitions from warming to cooling and back again—in the absence of changes in greenhouse gas could presage abrupt, catastrophic climate change in our future.

"What made these abrupt climate changes were circulation changes, and these changes took place from one year to the next more or less," says glaciologist Sune Olander Rasmussen of the Centre for Ice and Climate at the University of Copenhagen, who was part of a team that analyzed annual data from ice tubes extracted from as deep as 10,000 feet (3,085 meters) beneath the ice sheet, which were collected by the North Greenland Ice Core Project, a drilling expedition.

The researchers looked at three variables in the core: the amount of dust, the kind of hydrogen and the kind of oxygen in the ice. The amount of dust from year to year reveals that less of the grit traveled all the way to Greenland from the deserts of Asia (where the dust that settles over Greenland originates) around the time these transitions began, the team reports in Science.

"If things are starting to change in the dust first then we are looking for a [climate change] trigger somewhere outside of Greenland," Rasmussen says. "That could be monsoon changes," since different rainfall patterns in Asia would affect dust levels in the atmosphere.

Roughly five years after this change in dust levels, the levels of heavy hydrogen ensconced in the ice indicate that weather patterns were shifting and driving precipitation over Greenland that had originated in evaporated water from a different area of the ocean than had previously been the source of the island’s rain. And this change happened in as little as a year. "During the glacial period, abrupt warmings show change of the atmospheric circulation from year to year," says glaciologist Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, also of the University of Copenhagen, who participated in the study as well.

Following this abrupt shift, as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius) of warming occurred over the subsequent decades—a change that ultimately resulted in at least 33 feet (10 meters) of sea-level rise as the ice melted on Greenland.

Greenland can change quickly, even living up to its name, according to another paper in this week's Science. Sediment cores from the ocean show that forests of spruce and even fern grew on Greenland just 125,000 years ago. That means Greenland’s ice sheet—potentially responsible for as much as 75 feet (23 meters) of sea-level rise if it all melts—has grown and shrunk far more frequently than previously known.

"The question that arises from such findings is: How come the Greenland ice sheet at such a low latitude has remained so stable during the present interglacial [period] until now?" says study co-author and geochemist Claude Hillaire-Marcel of the University of Quebec in Montreal. "In view of the past instability—and sensitivity to temperature—of Greenland ice, serious concerns about its future under global warming stress do emerge."

Understanding that threat may require traveling even farther back in time via ice, to the transition to the last such warm period 130,000 years ago—the Eemian—when it was nine degrees F (five degrees C) warmer across Greenland. An ice core, known as NEEM (for North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling), that could address that question is being extracted now as part of the ongoing International Polar Year. "The circulation changes in a few years. The temperature change is happening over decades," Rasmussen notes. "The more we force a system, the more likely it is that we will get some kind of response that is violent."

David Archibald on Solar Variation

David Archibald has given us this very detailed paper on historical global climate and focuses on the role of solar activity. This is as complete a workout of the issues as I have so far seen.

http://www.lavoisier.com.au/papers/Conf2007/Archibald2007.pdf

Although he goes back through geologic time and produces the appropriate graphs, most of the data is hardly settled and certainly subject to and has been subject to ongoing debate and access to new proxies.

It is unfortunate but any proxy that can be projected to directly reflect temperatures, can also be modified almost randomly by other factors and we have no way to properly correct for this. The second problem is that once one draws a line between two points it is impossible to avoid thinking that this is a continuous process that is been measured. Yet climate is famously discontinuous

In any event, this is still a nice presentation, but do not get comfortable that any of this is all settled. More importantly, the Pleistocene Nonconformity has changed everything that has gone before inasmuch as the variation range of global temperature has been hugely narrowed. Therefore a look at the implied variation range for the past millions of years is misleading in the context of the Holocene.

What has been in fact remarkable has been the implied two degree range maintained for the past ten thousand years.

Archibald lays out the argument for the direct involvement of solar activity in driving the heat content of the atmosphere. He also spells out the nature of the current apparent slow onset of solar cycle number 24. His work is well done, and he argues forcefully for a major two degree drop over the next twenty years very similar to the Dalton minimum.

He also puts the contribution of CO2 to global warming into complete perspective and the result is negligible, largely because any response is logarithmic rather than linear and at best is good for a tenth of a degree. Solar variation appears to be able to produce variation over two degrees, several times any Anthropogenic effect.

This paper is well worth the read as it pulls together the total argument for the importance of solar variation and attempts to place it all in a continuous narrative that may be full of gaping holes but is at least making the attempt. This is much better than the many studies that usually focus on a narrow window of results and assume a position outside that window.

______________________________________

This short item gives the accepted opinion on solar variation.


Solar Variability: Striking a Balance with Climate Change

05.07.08

Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center The sun has powered almost everything on Earth since life began, including its climate. The sun also delivers an annual and seasonal impact, changing the character of each hemisphere as Earth's orientation shifts through the year. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, new forces have begun to exert significant influence on Earth's climate.

"For the last 20 to 30 years, we believe greenhouse gases have been the dominant influence on recent climate change," said Robert Cahalan, climatologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

For the past three decades NASA scientists have investigated the unique relationship between the sun and Earth. Using space-based tools, like the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE), they have studied how much solar energy illuminates Earth, and explored what happens to that energy once it penetrates the atmosphere. The amount of energy that reaches Earth's outer atmosphere is called the total solar irradiance. Total solar irradiance is variable over many different timescales, ranging from seconds to centuries due to changes in solar activity.

The sun goes through roughly an 11-year cycle of activity, from stormy to quiet and back again. Solar activity often occurs near sunspots, dark regions on the sun caused by concentrated magnetic fields. The solar irradiance measurement is much higher during solar maximum, when sunspot cycle and solar activity is high, versus solar minimum, when the sun is quiet and there are usually no sunspots.
The sun radiates huge amounts of electromagnetic energy in all directions. Earth is only one small recipient of the sun's energy; the sun's rays extend far out into the solar system, illuminating all the other planets. Credit: NASA

"The fluctuations in the solar cycle impacts Earth's global temperature by about 0.1 degree Celsius, slightly hotter during solar maximum and cooler during solar minimum," said Thomas Woods, solar scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder. "The sun is currently at its minimum, and the next solar maximum is expected in 2012."

Using SORCE, scientists have learned that about 1,361 watts per square meter of solar energy reaches Earth's outermost atmosphere during the sun's quietest period. But when the sun is active, 1.3 watts per square meter (0.1 percent) more energy reaches Earth. "This TSI measurement is very important to climate models that are trying to assess Earth-based forces on climate change," said Cahalan.

Over the past century, Earth's average temperature has increased by approximately 0.6 degrees Celsius (1.1 degrees Fahrenheit). Solar heating accounts for about 0.15 C, or 25 percent, of this change, according to computer modeling results published by NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies researcher David Rind in 2004. Earth's climate depends on the delicate balance between incoming solar radiation, outgoing thermal radiation and the composition of Earth's atmosphere. Even small changes in these parameters can affect climate. Around 30 percent of the solar energy that strikes Earth is reflected back into space. Clouds, atmospheric aerosols, snow, ice, sand, ocean surface and even rooftops play a role in deflecting the incoming rays. The remaining 70 percent of solar energy is absorbed by land, ocean, and atmosphere.

"Greenhouse gases block about 40 percent of outgoing thermal radiation that emanates from Earth," Woods said. The resulting imbalance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing thermal radiation will likely cause Earth to heat up over the next century, accelerating the melting polar ice caps, causing sea levels to rise and increasing the probability of more violent global weather patterns.

Non-Human Influences on Climate Change

Before the Industrial Age, the sun and volcanic eruptions were the major influences on Earth's climate change. Earth warmed and cooled in cycles. Major cool periods were ice ages, with the most recent ending about 11,000 years ago.

"Right now, we are in between major ice ages, in a period that has been called the Holocene,” said Cahalan. “Over recent decades, however, we have moved into a human-dominated climate that some have termed the Anthropocene. The major change in Earth's climate is now really dominated by human activity, which has never happened before."

The sun is relatively calm compared to other stars. "We don't know what the sun is going to do a hundred years from now," said Doug Rabin, a solar physicist at Goddard. "It could be considerably more active and therefore have more influence on Earth's climate."Or, it could be calmer, creating a cooler climate on Earth similar to what happened in the late 17th century. Almost no sunspots were observed on the sun's surface during the period from 1650 to 1715. This extended absence of solar activity may have been partly responsible for the Little Ice Age in Europe and may reflect cyclic or irregular changes in the sun's output over hundreds of years. During this period, winters in Europe were longer and colder by about 1 C than they are today.

Since then, there seems to have been on average a slow increase in solar activity. Unless we find a way to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning, the solar influence is not expected to dominate climate change. But the solar variations are expected to continue to modulate both warming and cooling trends at the level of 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.18 to 0.26 Fahrenheit) over many years.

Future Measurements of Solar Variability

For three decades, a suite of NASA and European Space Agency satellites have provided scientists with critical measurements of total solar irradiance. The Total Irradiance Monitor, also known as the TIM instrument, was launched in 2003 as part of the NASA’s SORCE mission, and provides irradiance measurements with state-of-the-art accuracy. TIM has been rebuilt as part of the Glory mission, scheduled to launch in 2009. Glory's TIM instrument will continue an uninterrupted 30-year record of solar irradiance measurements and will help researchers better understand the sun's direct and indirect effects on climate. Glory will also collect data on aerosols, one of the least understood pieces of the climate puzzle.

Major Meteor Blast 12900 BCE

Those of you who have read my article on the Pleistocene nonconformity will understand my interest in the attached article. My article was posted last July and since published in Viewzone.

In Pleistocene Nonconformity we argue that the Ice age was ended by a crustal movement of thirty degrees south along longitudes passing through Hudson Bay. See my article for all your immediate objections. This put the polar icecap into latitudes wherein it would obviously chill the atmosphere. This chilling lasted for two thousand years until the ice was removed and is known as the Younger Dryas. All this coincides with the worldwide climate, sea level and geological record although the exact timing of each may not yet be precisely synchronized.

The point I am making is that the earth's crust moved. Once this is accepted, all the unexplainable features in the record of conflicting geology disappear. Remember that an icecap at the latitude of New York or at least close by, means a huge global climate impact into the tropics, which is contradicted by the record. Again, read my article to work through the details.

My own suggestion for the motive impulse was the advent of a fast moving very dense meteorite close enough to the pole to impart sufficient power to get the crust moving. The other option was that an excess of ice was inherently unstable, except the icecap had been stable for a million years. A good blow would change that. It just seemed far less probable. Perhaps it was an accident that waited a million years to happen.

Now we have extremely tangible evidence of a major meteorite event that appears to have been explosive, causing a major burn off at the correct time slot. The extensive presence of soot and charcoal strongly suggests that the explosion itself released huge amounts of direct heat to produce the elemental carbon form.

I suggested in the article that Iceland sure looks like a good prospect for a meteor event if it were not ruled out for other good reasons. And I really prefer not to penetrate the earth’s crust just to see if it can be done.

The idea of a comet smashing into the icecap and jarring the crust loose is much more acceptable and even survivable in highland earth. The craters in the Carolinas may even be caused by massive chunks of ice been blasted out and crashing back to earth. Having fun yet?

Anyway, the Carolinas would only have been thirty degrees from the poles, so a shock there or further north would have plenty of vector. Once the crust started moving, it seems likely that the icecap mass determined the final thirty degrees off center resting position.

The extent of the event horizon is obviously huge covering the area of Clovis culture. The abrupt extinction of fauna is also strongly indicated. This at least fills in an important blank for the theory presented in my article. There is no reason to look for a bear when a lion is eating the meal. And as usual, it looks more interesting than anything I imagined.

By the way, that event ushered in the incredibly stable Holocene in which we now reside. We are good to go for millions of years without a polar icecap.

Published online before print September 27, 2007
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 10.1073/pnas.0706977104
OPEN ACCESS ARTICLE

Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling

R. B. Firestone a,b, A. West c, J. P. Kennett d, L. Becker e, T. E. Bunch f, Z. S. Revay g, P. H. Schultz h, T. Belgya g, D. J. Kennett i, J. M. Erlandson i, O. J. Dickenson j, A. C. Goodyear k, R. S. Harris h, G. A. Howard l, J. B. Kloosterman m, P. Lechler n, P. A. Mayewski o, J. Montgomery j, R. Poreda p, T. Darrah p, S. S. Que Hee q, A. R. Smith a, A. Stich r, W. Topping s, J. H. Wittke f, and W. S. Wolbach r
aLawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720; cGeoScience Consulting, Dewey, AZ 86327; dDepartment of Earth Sciences and eInstitute of Crustal Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106; fNorthern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ 86011; gInstitute for Isotope and Surface Chemistry, H-1525, Budapest, Hungary; hDepartment of Geological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912; iDepartment of Anthropology and Museum of Natural and Cultural History, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403; jEastern New Mexico University, Portales, NM 88130; kSouth Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208; lRestoration Systems, LLC, Raleigh, NC 27604; mRozenstraat 85, 1018 NN, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; nBureau of Mines and Geology, University of Nevada, Reno, NV 89557; oClimate Change Institute, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469; pUniversity of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627; qDepartment of Environmental Health Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095; sP.O. Box 141, Irons, MI 49644; and rDepartment of Chemistry, DePaul University, Chicago, IL 60614

Communicated by Steven M. Stanley, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, July 26, 2007 (received for review March 13, 2007)

A carbon-rich black layer, dating to 12.9 ka, has been previously identified at 50 Clovis-age sites across North America and appears contemporaneous with the abrupt onset of Younger Dryas (YD) cooling. The in situ bones of extinct Pleistocene megafauna, along with Clovis tool assemblages, occur below this black layer but not within or above it. Causes for the extinctions, YD cooling, and termination of Clovis culture have long been controversial. In this paper, we provide evidence for an extraterrestrial (ET) impact event at 12.9 ka, which we hypothesize caused abrupt environmental changes that contributed to YD cooling, major ecological reorganization, broad-scale extinctions, and rapid human behavioral shifts at the end of the Clovis Period. Clovis-age sites in North American are overlain by a thin, discrete layer with varying peak abundances of (i) magnetic grains with iridium, (ii) magnetic microspherules, (iii) charcoal, (iv) soot, (v) carbon spherules, (vi) glass-like carbon containing nanodiamonds, and (vii) fullerenes with ET helium, all of which are evidence for an ET impact and associated biomass burning at 12.9 ka. This layer also extends throughout at least 15 Carolina Bays, which are unique, elliptical depressions, oriented to the northwest across the Atlantic Coastal Plain. We propose that one or more large, low-density ET objects exploded over northern North America, partially destabilizing the Laurentide Ice Sheet and triggering YD cooling. The shock wave, thermal pulse, and event-related environmental effects (e.g., extensive biomass burning and food limitations) contributed to end-Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions and adaptive shifts among PaleoAmericans in

The Real Great Flood

The one aspect of the onset of the Holocene that I find difficult to understand is the fact that so little is made of it.

Before the break, mankind was restricted to operating in a very narrow tropical band on a small fraction of the globe's land surface. Every where else the climate marched back and forth very quickly over several degrees making agriculture totally impossible with the possible exception of some herding. And the carnivores made that pretty dicey.

Today, that same temperature swing is a half degree or so every century, and we still yell.

When the ice age ended 12,500 years ago, the northern ice melted raising the sea level 300 feet over a number of centuries. This sank the edge of the continental shelf below sea level everywhere, inundating coastal plains everywhere.

This certainly explains the Bronze age traditions of a great flood that humanity fled. The rest of the story means little in the face of the universality of this coastal inundation that destroyed most of the human habitat of the time.

My own small contribution is to attempt to understand the crustal shift mechanism that brought these changes into been. In any event, the actual collapse of the ice age is a historic reality, regardless of causation. At least my causation mechanism has the benefit of promising us a continuation of the Holocene (or Antropocene) for millions of years. Does anyone understand just how incredibly lucky we are to have the current crustal configuration that we have?

The Arctic is a nearly closed sea that could easily become an icecap again if any number of significant shifts took place . How did we end up with the right configuration in the first place? It has been suggested that the crust shifted several times in order to get it right. I find this difficult to subscribe to because it seems so unnecessary. Once by accident seems good enough. However, if the dynamic causation model in fact predominates, then multiple shifts become natural until the exact configuration emerges that eliminate the northern ice cap.

I also note that the southern ice cap is stable on a large land mass, but is tightly bounded ensuring any excess ice finds its way into the ocean long before there is enough build up to endanger global crustal balance.

I suspect that this configuration is stable until plate tectonics finally changes the configuration, millions of years from now.

This still begs the question of why are we not making more of the dramatic change that occurred a mere 12500 years age. It undoubtedly made it possible for the human animal to populate the globe as an agriculturalist. And it seems strange that the promoters of biblical studies do not jump on this, although it queers any more recent middle eastern scenario. However, they usually have no difficulty in questioning the age of anything.

My publication of the Pleistocene Nonconformity a few months back covers the causation problem in some detail for the interested reader. It can be found on the View Zone.

The Global Climate Engine

I have just commenced reading a book that focuses on the past 20,000 years of human development as seen through the eyes of archeology. It appears useful and once I have properly gotten into it I will do a review for you all. What really jumped out at me however, was a chart that maps the oxygen isotope ratio in the ice caps.

Variations in the ratio is a proxy for whether the global climate is warmer or colder. It is also reasonably reliable over the twenty thousand year time span as is the ability to take ice samples in the Antarctic covering the same period. I think that we can accept the results as useful over the designated time span. What certainly can be trusted is the observed variability ratio.

What stands out in the chart is that the Pleistocene Nonconformity is more abrupt than perhaps understood before. The global climatic shift was not just from a seriously cooler climate to the our warmer era known as the Holocene, but from a clearly very volatile regime of shifting worldwide climatic conditions to the current regime of very low variability.

The chart is utterly compelling. For twelve thousand years the chart has flat lined showing minimal variability. Prior to that, not only was the average temperature colder, it moved back and forth over a wide range of variability that is at least an order of magnitude greater than is apparent today.

In reality, this confirms the geologic nature of the Pleistocene Nonconformity more that any other argument. A one million year regime that included a huge northern icecap ended in a couple of thousand years due to the ice cap been shifted thirty degrees into a nonsustaining environment that also was able to prevent the mere rebuilding of the icecap in one place as it was been melted in another. We had an incredibly lucky throw of the dice that has actually likely seen the global climate restored closer to the type of climate experienced over the past billion years.

My readers will want to revisit my posts under Pleistocene Nonconformity back in June and July.

For the record, the onset of the northern ice age coincides with the establishment of the Panama - Central American land bridge that closed off the Atlantic a million years ago. A pretty unique event in global geologic history. It has also taken a pretty unique configuration to prevent the establishment of a full icecap at the pole during our era. It is principally dependent on a large imbalance of northern equatorial waters been forced into the Arctic. It is almost an engine.

That engine has made the northern hemisphere hugely habitable to ourselves. Without it, North America, Europe and all of temperate Asia becomes largely uninhabitable, as was true during all of the Pleistocene.

Perhaps now we understand better why humanity broke out of the tropics only ten thousand years ago. Prior to that it was not really a very good option. All the advantages of the temperate climate were simply not available and in those small areas were they existed, wide climate swings made any culture other than game hunting terribly vulnerable. Our so called climate shifts are trivial by comparison.

Thus, prior to the shift from Pleistocene to Holocene, mankind could hope to establish a proto civilization in only the tropics and semi tropics. This included all of Africa, the Indonesian Plain and India and not much else.

The advent of the Holocene gave us the world and the possibility of agriculture as we know it.